OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
SSDD-GAN: Single-Step Denoising Diffusion GAN for Cochlear Implant Surgical Scene Completion
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

Recent deep learning-based image completion methods, including both inpainting and outpainting, have demonstrated promising results in restoring corrupted images by effectively filling various missing regions. Among these, Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) and Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models (DDPMs) have been employed as key generative image completion approaches, excelling in the field of generating high-quality restorations with reduced artifacts and improved fine details. In previous work, we developed a method aimed at synthesizing views from novel microscope positions for mastoidectomy surgeries; however, that approach did not have the ability to restore the surrounding surgical scene environment. In this paper, we propose an efficient method to complete the surgical scene of the synthetic postmastoidectomy dataset. Our approach leverages self-supervised learning on real surgical datasets to train a Single-Step Denoising Diffusion-GAN (SSDD-GAN), combining the advantages of diffusion models with the adversarial optimization of GANs for improved Structural Similarity results of 6%. The trained model is then directly applied to the synthetic postmastoidectomy dataset using a zero-shot approach, enabling the generation of realistic and complete surgical scenes without the need for explicit ground-truth labels from the synthetic postmastoidectomy dataset. This method addresses key limitations in previous work, offering a novel pathway for full surgical microscopy scene completion and enhancing the usability of the synthetic postmastoidectomy dataset in surgical preoperative planning and intraoperative navigation.
Performance Analysis of Traditional VQA Models Under Limited Computational Resources
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

In real-world applications where computational resources are limited, effectively integrating visual and textual information for Visual Question Answering (VQA) presents significant challenges. This paper investigates the performance of traditional models under computational constraints, focusing on enhancing VQA performance, particularly for numerical and counting questions. We evaluate models based on Bidirectional GRU (BidGRU), GRU, Bidirectional LSTM (BidLSTM), and Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN), analyzing the impact of different vocabulary sizes, fine-tuning strategies, and embedding dimensions. Experimental results show that the BidGRU model with an embedding dimension of 300 and a vocabulary size of 3000 achieves the best overall performance without the computational overhead of larger models. Ablation studies emphasize the importance of attention mechanisms and counting information in handling complex reasoning tasks under resource limitations. Our research provides valuable insights for developing more efficient VQA models suitable for deployment in environments with limited computational capacity.
RECOVER: Designing a Large Language Model-based Remote Patient Monitoring System for Postoperative Gastrointestinal Cancer Care
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2025
Year: 2025

Cancer surgery is a key treatment for gastrointestinal (GI) cancers, a group of cancers that account for more than 35% of cancer-related deaths worldwide, but postoperative complications are unpredictable and can be life-threatening. In this paper, we investigate how recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) can benefit remote patient monitoring (RPM) systems through clinical integration by designing RECOVER, an LLM-powered RPM system for postoperative GI cancer care. To closely engage stakeholders in the design process, we first conducted seven participatory design sessions with five clinical staff and interviewed five cancer patients to derive six major design strategies for integrating clinical guidelines and information needs into LLM-based RPM systems. We then designed and implemented RECOVER, which features an LLM-powered conversational agent for cancer patients and an interactive dashboard for clinical staff to enable efficient postoperative RPM. Finally, we used RECOVER as a pilot system to assess the implementation of our design strategies with four clinical staff and five patients, providing design implications by identifying crucial design elements, offering insights on responsible AI, and outlining opportunities for future LLM-powered RPM systems.
Public DNS Resolvers Meet Content Delivery Networks: A Performance Assessment of the Interplay
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2025
Year: 2025

This paper investigates two key performance aspects of the interplay between public DNS resolution services and content delivery networks -- the latency of DNS queries for resolving CDN-accelerated hostnames and the latency between the end-user and the CDN's edge server obtained by the user through a given resolution service. While these important issues have been considered in the past, significant developments, such as the IPv6 finally getting traction, the adoption of the ECS extension to DNS by major DNS resolution services, and the embracing of anycast by some CDNs warrant a reassessment under these new realities. Among the resolution services we consider, We find Google DNS and OpenDNS to lag behind the Cloudflare resolver and, for some CDNs, Quad9 in terms of DNS latency, and trace the cause to drastically lower cache hit rates. At the same time, we find that Google and OpenDNS have largely closed the gap with ISP resolvers in the quality of CDNs'client-to-edge-server mappings as measured by latency, while the Cloudflare resolver still shows some penalty with Akamai, and Quad9 exhibits a noticeable penalty with three of the four CDNs in the study, keeping up only for Cloudflare CDN that does not use DNS to map clients to servers. Finally, in several locations, we observe IPv6 penalty in the latency of client-to-CDN-edge-server mappings produced by the resolvers. Moreover, this penalty does not rise above typical thresholds employed by the Happy Eyeballs algorithm for falling back to IPv4 communication. Thus, dual-stacked clients in these locations may experience suboptimal performance.
A 3D Multimodal Feature for Infrastructure Anomaly Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

Ageing structures require periodic inspections to identify structural defects. Previous work has used geometric distortions to locate cracks in synthetic masonry bridge point clouds but has struggled to detect small cracks. To address this limitation, this study proposes a novel 3D multimodal feature, 3DMulti-FPFHI, that combines a customized Fast Point Feature Histogram (FPFH) with an intensity feature. This feature is integrated into the PatchCore anomaly detection algorithm and evaluated through statistical and parametric analyses. The method is further evaluated using point clouds of a real masonry arch bridge and a full-scale experimental model of a concrete tunnel. Results show that the 3D intensity feature enhances inspection quality by improving crack detection; it also enables the identification of water ingress which introduces intensity anomalies. The 3DMulti-FPFHI outperforms FPFH and a state-of-the-art multimodal anomaly detection method. The potential of the method to address diverse infrastructure anomaly detection scenarios is highlighted by the minimal requirements for data compared to learning-based methods. The code and related point cloud dataset are available at https://github.com/Jingyixiong/3D-Multi-FPFHI.
TAP-CAM: A Tunable Approximate Matching Engine based on Ferroelectric Content Addressable Memory
Venue: arXiv cs.ET 2025
Year: 2025

Pattern search is crucial in numerous analytic applications for retrieving data entries akin to the query. Content Addressable Memories (CAMs), an in-memory computing fabric, directly compare input queries with stored entries through embedded comparison logic, facilitating fast parallel pattern search in memory. While conventional CAM designs offer exact match functionality, they are inadequate for meeting the approximate search needs of emerging data-intensive applications. Some recent CAM designs propose approximate matching functions, but they face limitations such as excessively large cell area or the inability to precisely control the degree of approximation. In this paper, we propose TAP-CAM, a novel ferroelectric field effect transistor (FeFET) based ternary CAM (TCAM) capable of both exact and tunable approximate matching. TAP-CAM employs a compact 2FeFET-2R cell structure as the entry storage unit, and similarities in Hamming distances between input queries and stored entries are measured using an evaluation transistor associated with the matchline of CAM array. The operation, robustness and performance of the proposed design at array level have been discussed and evaluated, respectively. We conduct a case study of K-nearest neighbor (KNN) search to benchmark the proposed TAP-CAM at application level. Results demonstrate that compared to 16T CMOS CAM with exact match functionality, TAP-CAM achieves a 16.95x energy improvement, along with a 3.06% accuracy enhancement. Compared to 2FeFET TCAM with approximate match functionality, TAP-CAM achieves a 6.78x energy improvement.
On Reference (In-)Determinacy in Natural Language Inference
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2025
Year: 2025

We revisit the reference determinacy (RD) assumption in the task of natural language inference (NLI), i.e., the premise and hypothesis are assumed to refer to the same context when human raters annotate a label. While RD is a practical assumption for constructing a new NLI dataset, we observe that current NLI models, which are typically trained solely on hypothesis-premise pairs created with the RD assumption, fail in downstream applications such as fact verification, where the input premise and hypothesis may refer to different contexts. To highlight the impact of this phenomenon in real-world use cases, we introduce RefNLI, a diagnostic benchmark for identifying reference ambiguity in NLI examples. In RefNLI, the premise is retrieved from a knowledge source (i.e., Wikipedia) and does not necessarily refer to the same context as the hypothesis. With RefNLI, we demonstrate that finetuned NLI models and few-shot prompted LLMs both fail to recognize context mismatch, leading to over 80% false contradiction and over 50% entailment predictions. We discover that the existence of reference ambiguity in NLI examples can in part explain the inherent human disagreements in NLI and provide insight into how the RD assumption impacts the NLI dataset creation process.
Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning in Wireless Distributed Networks for 6G
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2025
Year: 2025

The introduction of intelligent interconnectivity between the physical and human worlds has attracted great attention for future sixth-generation (6G) networks, emphasizing massive capacity, ultra-low latency, and unparalleled reliability. Wireless distributed networks and multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL), both of which have evolved from centralized paradigms, are two promising solutions for the great attention. Given their distinct capabilities, such as decentralization and collaborative mechanisms, integrating these two paradigms holds great promise for unleashing the full power of 6G, attracting significant research and development attention. This paper provides a comprehensive study on MARL-assisted wireless distributed networks for 6G. In particular, we introduce the basic mathematical background and evolution of wireless distributed networks and MARL, as well as demonstrate their interrelationships. Subsequently, we analyze different structures of wireless distributed networks from the perspectives of homogeneous and heterogeneous. Furthermore, we introduce the basic concepts of MARL and discuss two typical categories, including model-based and model-free. We then present critical challenges faced by MARL-assisted wireless distributed networks, providing important guidance and insights for actual implementation. We also explore an interplay between MARL-assisted wireless distributed networks and emerging techniques, such as information bottleneck and mirror learning, delivering in-depth analyses and application scenarios. Finally, we outline several compelling research directions for future MARL-assisted wireless distributed networks.
The memory of $ω$-regular and BC($Σ_2^0$) objectives
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2025
Year: 2025

In the context of 2-player zero-sum infinite-duration games played on (potentially infinite) graphs, the memory of an objective is the smallest integer k such that in any game won by Eve, she has a strategy with <= k states of memory. For omega-regular objectives, checking whether the memory equals a given number k was not known to be decidable. In this work, we focus on objectives in BC(Sigma0^2), i.e. recognised by a potentially infinite deterministic parity automaton. We provide a class of automata that recognise objectives with memory <= k, leading to the following results: (1) For omega-regular objectives, the memory over finite and infinite games coincides and can be computed in NP. (2) Given two objectives W1 and W2 in BC(Sigma0^2) and assuming W1 is prefix-independent, the memory of W1 U W2 is at most the product of the memories of W1 and W2. Our results also apply to chromatic memory, the variant where strategies can update their memory state only depending on which colour is seen.
Uni-Retrieval: A Multi-Style Retrieval Framework for STEM's Education
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2025
Year: 2025

In AI-facilitated teaching, leveraging various query styles to interpret abstract text descriptions is crucial for ensuring high-quality teaching. However, current retrieval models primarily focus on natural text-image retrieval, making them insufficiently tailored to educational scenarios due to the ambiguities in the retrieval process. In this paper, we propose a diverse expression retrieval task tailored to educational scenarios, supporting retrieval based on multiple query styles and expressions. We introduce the STEM Education Retrieval Dataset (SER), which contains over 24,000 query pairs of different styles, and the Uni-Retrieval, an efficient and style-diversified retrieval vision-language model based on prompt tuning. Uni-Retrieval extracts query style features as prototypes and builds a continuously updated Prompt Bank containing prompt tokens for diverse queries. This bank can updated during test time to represent domain-specific knowledge for different subject retrieval scenarios. Our framework demonstrates scalability and robustness by dynamically retrieving prompt tokens based on prototype similarity, effectively facilitating learning for unknown queries. Experimental results indicate that Uni-Retrieval outperforms existing retrieval models in most retrieval tasks. This advancement provides a scalable and precise solution for diverse educational needs.
NeuralPrefix: A Zero-shot Sensory Data Imputation Plugin
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

Real-world sensing challenges such as sensor failures, communication issues, and power constraints lead to data intermittency. An issue that is known to undermine the traditional classification task that assumes a continuous data stream. Previous works addressed this issue by designing bespoke solutions (i.e. task-specific and/or modality-specific imputation). These approaches, while effective for their intended purposes, had limitations in their applicability across different tasks and sensor modalities. This raises an important question: Can we build a task-agnostic imputation pipeline that is transferable to new sensors without requiring additional training? In this work, we formalise the concept of zero-shot imputation and propose a novel approach that enables the adaptation of pre-trained models to handle data intermittency. This framework, named NeuralPrefix, is a generative neural component that precedes a task model during inference, filling in gaps caused by data intermittency. NeuralPrefix is built as a continuous dynamical system, where its internal state can be estimated at any point in time by solving an Ordinary Differential Equation (ODE). This approach allows for a more versatile and adaptable imputation method, overcoming the limitations of task-specific and modality-specific solutions. We conduct a comprehensive evaluation of NeuralPrefix on multiple sensory datasets, demonstrating its effectiveness across various domains. When tested on intermittent data with a high 50% missing data rate, NeuralPreifx accurately recovers all the missing samples, achieving SSIM score between 0.93-0.96. Zero-shot evaluations show that NeuralPrefix generalises well to unseen datasets, even when the measurements come from a different modality.
Study of Robust Multiuser Scheduling and Power Allocation in Cell-Free MIMO Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2025
Year: 2025

This paper introduces a robust resource allocation framework for the downlink of cell-free massive multi-input multi-output (CF-mMIMO) networks to address the effects caused by imperfect channel state information (CSI). In particular, the proposed robust resource allocation framework includes a robust user scheduling algorithm to optimize the network's sum-rate and a robust power allocation technique aimed at minimizing the mean square error (MSE) for a network with a linear precoder. Unlike non-robust resource allocation techniques, the proposed robust strategies effectively counteract the effects of imperfect CSI, enhancing network efficiency and reliability. Simulation results show a significant improvement in network performance obtained by the proposed approaches, highlighting the impact of robust resource allocation in wireless networks.
Strategic Queues with Priority Classes
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2025
Year: 2025

We consider a strategic M/M/1 queueing model under a first-come-first-served regime, where customers are split into two classes and class $A$ has priority over class $B$. Customers can decide whether to join the queue or balk, and, in case they have joined the queue, whether and when to renege. We study the equilibrium strategies and compare the equilibrium outcome and the social optimum in the two cases where the social optimum is or is not constrained by priority.
GRAIT: Gradient-Driven Refusal-Aware Instruction Tuning for Effective Hallucination Mitigation
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2025
Year: 2025

Refusal-Aware Instruction Tuning (RAIT) aims to enhance Large Language Models (LLMs) by improving their ability to refuse responses to questions beyond their knowledge, thereby reducing hallucinations and improving reliability. Effective RAIT must address two key challenges: firstly, effectively reject unknown questions to minimize hallucinations; secondly, avoid over-refusal to ensure questions that can be correctly answered are not rejected, thereby maintain the helpfulness of LLM outputs. In this paper, we address the two challenges by deriving insightful observations from the gradient-based perspective, and proposing the Gradient-driven Refusal Aware Instruction Tuning Framework GRAIT: (1) employs gradient-driven sample selection to effectively minimize hallucinations and (2) introduces an adaptive weighting mechanism during fine-tuning to reduce the risk of over-refusal, achieving the balance between accurate refusals and maintaining useful responses. Experimental evaluations on open-ended and multiple-choice question answering tasks demonstrate that GRAIT significantly outperforms existing RAIT methods in the overall performance. The source code and data will be available at https://github.com/opendatalab/GRAIT .
Protecting Intellectual Property of EEG-based Neural Networks with Watermarking
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

EEG-based neural networks, pivotal in medical diagnosis and brain-computer interfaces, face significant intellectual property (IP) risks due to their reliance on sensitive neurophysiological data and resource-intensive development. Current watermarking methods, particularly those using abstract trigger sets, lack robust authentication and fail to address the unique challenges of EEG models. This paper introduces a cryptographic wonder filter-based watermarking framework tailored for EEG-based neural networks. Leveraging collision-resistant hashing and public-key encryption, the wonder filter embeds the watermark during training, ensuring minimal distortion ($\leq 5\%$ drop in EEG task accuracy) and high reliability (100\% watermark detection). The framework is rigorously evaluated against adversarial attacks, including fine-tuning, transfer learning, and neuron pruning. Results demonstrate persistent watermark retention, with classification accuracy for watermarked states remaining above 90\% even after aggressive pruning, while primary task performance degrades faster, deterring removal attempts. Piracy resistance is validated by the inability to embed secondary watermarks without severe accuracy loss ( $>10\%$ in EEGNet and CCNN models). Cryptographic hashing ensures authentication, reducing brute-force attack success probabilities. Evaluated on the DEAP dataset across models (CCNN, EEGNet, TSception), the method achieves $>99.4\%$ null-embedding accuracy, effectively eliminating false positives. By integrating wonder filters with EEG-specific adaptations, this work bridges a critical gap in IP protection for neurophysiological models, offering a secure, tamper-proof solution for healthcare and biometric applications. The framework's robustness against adversarial modifications underscores its potential to safeguard sensitive EEG models while maintaining diagnostic utility.
Interactive Inference: A Neuromorphic Theory of Human-Computer Interaction
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2025
Year: 2025

Neuromorphic Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) is a theoretical approach to designing better user experiences (UX) motivated by advances in the understanding of the neurophysiology of the brain. Inspired by the neuroscientific theory of Active Inference, Interactive Inference is a first example of such approach. It offers a simplified interpretation of Active Inference that allows designers to more readily apply this theory to design and evaluation. In Interactive Inference, user behaviour is modeled as Bayesian inference on progress and goal distributions that predicts the next action. We show how the error between goal and progress distributions, or Bayesian surprise, can be modeled as a simple mean square error of the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of a task. The problem is that the user's capacity to process Bayesian surprise follows the logarithm of this SNR. This means errors rise quickly once average capacity is exceeded. Our model allows the quantitative analysis of performance and error using one framework that can provide real-time estimates of the mental load in users that needs to be minimized by design. We show how three basic laws of HCI, Hick's Law, Fitts' Law and the Power Law can be expressed using our model. We then test the validity of the model by empirically measuring how well it predicts human performance and error in a car following task. Results suggest that driver processing capacity indeed is a logarithmic function of the SNR of the distance to a lead car. This result provides initial evidence that Interactive Interference can be useful as a new theoretical design tool.